Try saying the title of this first collection aloud. Mollusc. It's a word that rolls in the mouth, making you more than usually aware of lips and tongue. Helen Clare is exquisitely aware of the oral (and aural) properties of language. In 'The Singing Lesson', for example, she invokes the power of 'n' so effectively you can feel it intoning:

She makes me ning my scales, feeling the
bridge of my nose
for vibrations. When I am more advanced
I will be permitted to ning-nu.

By the end of the poem, the 'n' sounds (in descend, garden, singing) resonate uncannily.

Whenever Clare writes about sound, she is good. 'Shell-like' recalls childhood, a time when she and her brother rode in the back of a "Hillman Imp/blanked by the back of our parents' head/sound ripening in our mouths". Her brother can no longer hear clearly. These days his flat (which she describes as "an amnion") is all volume, an attempt to drown out tinnitus. Her lament for the past strikes the single note that "the tiny mollusc/of your inner ear sings to itself as it listens". Even the last word of the poem ("silence") invokes a singing 'n' after it's gone

References to amnion and inner ear connect with another part of the poet's past, as a science teacher. In 'Lotl' schoolgirl adolescents peer at an axolotl in the lab tank in "Biol 2". Unlike the girls who tap on the glass, Lotl won't be allowed to "crawl from the water" - "Once it's done there's no going back." More painfully, scientific detachment informs the final sequence, 'The Gooseberry Bush'. Here 15 poems chart the failure of science. None of the new methods - in this case - result in a longed-for pregnancy:

like coral.

Poetry rarely has the power to shock these days, but I think Helen Clare's can do it. Sometimes it's aspects of content, sometimes it's intensity, sometimes it's the plangent cadence of lovely lines followed by harsh ones. Not all these poems are sad, but it's the melancholy that stays with me. 'On Every Tube' (for which I would buy the book alone) made me cry.